Table of Contents

Ubuntu - Backups - Backup using rsnapshot

rsnapshot is a remote filesystem snapshot utility, based on rsync.

Configure

An example config file (/root/scripts/rsnapshot-home.conf) to backup a remote file-server.

/root/scripts/rsnapshot-home.conf
config_version  1.2
snapshot_root   /media/Backup/
cmd_cp  /bin/cp
cmd_rm  /bin/rm
cmd_rsync       /usr/bin/rsync
cmd_ssh /usr/bin/ssh
cmd_logger      /usr/bin/logger
cmd_du  /usr/bin/du
interval        daily   7
interval        weekly  4
interval        monthly 3
verbose 2
loglevel        4
logfile /var/log/rsnapshot-home.log
exclude_file    /root/scripts/rsnapshot-home.exclude
rsync_long_args --delete        --numeric-ids   --delete-excluded
lockfile        /var/run/rsnapshot.pid
backup  username@example.com:/export/files/      files/

NOTE: The config file is tab delimited so you will get errors if you use space instead!

Manual daily backup

NOTE: A passwordless SSH connection should be configured from the backup server to the file server if you plan to run this as a automated job using crontab. 

sudo rsnapshot -c /root/scripts/rsnapshot-home.conf daily

NOTE: This will produce a folder structure like this with the backups 

/media/Backup/daily.0/files
/media/Backup/daily.1/files
/media/Backup/daily.2/files
/media/Backup/daily.3/files
...

Where daily.0 is the newest backup.

  • The backup files are store in the same form as on the file server so they can be browsed using a regular file browser.

Reports

A report can be configured to be sent after every backup with the perl script rsnapreport.pl.

References

The rsnapshot HOWTO